[n0on3]

Their results are simply not reliable. The matching approach often matches too many things (hey, this could be A or B or C or D or E or F ...or 42!), or picks up things that have nothing to do with the license of some target (hello randomly included file with some completely unrelated license header and is not even included in the build but is there for some reason, meet your new friend, the utility script copied from somewhere else also not included in the build with an header for another unrelated license. You two feel lonely? let me introduce you to this other wonderful script included in some particular form of packaging) and of course cannot compensate for poorly declared licenses, typos, weird non-standard (or simply archaic/deprecated) ways to specify the licenses and so on and so forth.

It's not a fault of the tools themselves, but in practice they don't help much in real world situations. Basically you end up in need to do so many checks and manual fixes that you might as well not use these tools in the first place.

In an enterprise context one of three things happens: (1) you end up relying on a commercial solution (which is also not that reliable but you delude yourself into thinking it's not your problem anymore... although to be fair commercial solutions have curated licenses attributions and facilitate handling this mess); (2) you build your own thing that uses these (and other) tools but automates a bunch of fixtures so you don't need to go insane every time you need to regenerate an accurate SBOM with related licenses; (3) you quit software engineering, move to a remote location and start an alternative career as an alpaca breeder while whomever takes on your role pretends to ignore the issue and keeps shipping inaccurate declarations of licenses for dependencies thinking that's fine because nobody really cares.

[tsteenbe]

This is why several German automotive OSPOs are working together to build OSS Review Toolkit (ORT) - it kinda glues various open source tools like ScanCode but adds features like the ability to manually correct findings and a policy as code to do risk management at scale/speed. Full disclosure I one ORT maintainers.